My Life in E-flat

By Chan Parker

A memoir of the Jazz Age and a life profoundly influenced by it

My Life in E-flat is the remarkable memoir of a woman who witnessed some of the most important movements in the history of jazz. Through her autobiography, Chan Parker provides intimate insights into the music and into life with Charlie Parker, the key figure in the development of bebop and one of the most important of all jazz musicians.

Born Beverly Dolores Berg in New York City at the height of the Jazz Age, Parker's father was a producer of vaudeville shows and her mother was a dancer in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Parker became part of the jazz culture as a nightclub dancer and later as the wife of jazz saxophonists Charlie Parker and then Phil Woods.

In a moving and candid portrait of Charlie Parker, the author describes in harrowing detail a man of incredible talent besieged with addictions and self-destructiveness. She painfully recounts his death at the age of 35 while married to her and its effect on her life as well as on the musical world. Parker's honest portrait of one of the most gifted musicians in jazz provides unique insight into the history of the music and the difficulties faced by African American performers during the 1940s.

Parker also reflects on her struggle to find her own voice and on her work with Clint Eastwood on the film biography of Charlie Parker, Bird (1988).

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643362786

Book preview

PROLOGUE

There is a house which recurs in my dreams. I am always in a car driving along familiar streets, up the long hill searching for that house on Park Hill Road where I lived as a child. My mother, widowed with two young children, sold real estate during the depression. No one was buying, so we moved into that lovely Victorian white elephant in Westchester, rent free. I don’t know how she managed to heat its fifteen rooms, but it was a fairy-tale house to a young girl. Shingled, with turrets, gables, bay windows, gardens, two salons, fireplaces, a dumbwaiter, a central hall between innumerable bedrooms, a game room in the basement, with a full-size professional pool table, and best of all, for me, a finished attic which became my ballroom. Oh, the grand parties I planned; all the snobbiest girls and the most handsome boys would come. In the end, it was the pool room that attracted the boys and where I experienced my first closed-mouth kisses.

In my dreams I sometimes catch a glimpse of that house, but I’ve never been able to enter it. Surely, it no longer exists. Does Park Hill Road? Would I have the courage outside of dreams to mount that hill again? I think we leave a part of ourselves in every house we have loved. I measure my years by the houses in which I have lived. So foolish to leave one’s precious life in wood and stone. But perhaps that is the rent we pay for our memories, both bitter and sweet.

To deny the past is to limit the future. To deny the past is to deny the seed that brought life, determined our genes and characteristics, the teat which nourished, the culture which formed our soul, our mind, and forged our identity. Of course, we must all find our own way, our own selves. But we cannot deny what formed us, or else we must begin again, newly born without a past and, perhaps, lacking a future. Only a genius can make up a life without past influences or without the joys, sorrows, and all the emotions that are part of every family and which color our lives in every way.

Closed doors and windows let in neither light nor surprises.

My paternal grandparents left Russia when my father was a boy, and the family settled in Gloversville, New Hampshire. My mother’s grandparents crossed America in a covered wagon and bought land in Sidney, Iowa. I reversed the direction to return to the continent of my ancestors. It took me half a century to discover there is more to life than an alto saxophone. Now I live in a country not my own, in a house haunted by friendly ghosts whose acquaintance I made over forty years ago.

I live in France, in a small village off the beaten path about seventy kilometers south of Paris in the grain belt. The principal crops are wheat, sunflowers, sugar beets, and colza. In the summer, a bright rectangle of yellow breaks through the sealike green of waving wheat. The roadsides are bordered with red poppies.

In the soft, quiet dusk of a warm early summer’s evening in 1975, the door to the courtyard is open. The children are off on quiet pursuits; our collie, Snoopy, is licking her nettle-distressed paws in the sun-sweetened grass now heavy with dew; and Flash, spooky as only a Persian cat can be, is dodging aggressive barn swallows and asserting herself with insouciant fireflies. My mother and I linger over last year’s cherries in eau de vie. She starts talking about her own family, reminiscing:

My ancestors came from England, Wales, Scotland, and France in the 1600s. My maternal grandfather, Joseph Hiatt, was only five years old when he crossed the country to Iowa in a covered wagon with his father and brothers. They settled 160 acres adjacent to Sidney. In those days, you could buy land for practically nothing. Later, Joseph Hiatt would meet his future wife, Minerva. She had been kidnapped when she was just a girl and sold as an indentured servant, but she had somehow managed to escape from this form of slavery. Minerva and Joseph Hiatt settled on a portion of land called Hiatfs Addition, in an old house which became a local landmark. They had three children: my mother, Mina, my aunt Nell, and my uncle Alvo.

Mina Hiatt married into the Lankton family from Springfield, Illinois. Her husband, Charles, was proud of the fact that his father, John D. Lankton, often used to sit on Abraham Lincoln’s knee. Although many women died in childbirth in those days, Mina gave Charles ten children, five daughters, and then five sons. Lloyd was the oldest son. The eldest daughter, Alice, died before I was born. Cecile was born next, Beulah was third, and Ruby was fourth. Ruby died during the horrible flu epidemic in 1918. I was the fifth child. Then came the twins, Joe and John, who were followed by Harold. By the time Chick, the tenth child, was born, our family had moved from Sidney to Shenandoah, Iowa.

When I was six, we lived in a new house in Sidney. The town had five hundred people then. Like all the kids, I spent most of my summers on the farm with Grandfather and Grandmother Hiatt: They had a big rambling farm and house. I was my grandmother’s favorite, so I stayed there more than the others. I remember that they used a horse and buggy. There were other horses and, of course, some pigs and cattle. In the evening I would help my uncle Alvo bring in the cows to be milked. We had to cross a stream to get to the wood. My uncle had made a big swing from a rope so that when we came to the stream, we could swing across to the other side. Oh, it was fun! We loved that.

My grandfather used to do all the plowing and I would bring a pail of fresh water to him in the fields. In the summer, I followed him behind the plow pulling up the cold earth. I ran barefoot behind him and if he plowed up a snake, I’d run like hell back to the house. Grandpa used to say that he had known Jesse James when he was working in St. Joseph, Missouri. At that time, my grandfather was an interior decorator and did fancy painting. The lead in the paint was what probably killed him.

That was such a beautiful farm. We could see it across the valley from our house in Sidney, and when it caught fire we watched it burn to the ground. There was no fire department in those days. The farm house was rebuilt, but my grandmother died soon after.

We moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the river from Omaha where I met Cecile Wilson, Ida McAdams, and her sister, Cecilia, who became my best friend. The McAdamses moved to Chicago. In 1917 Cecile Wilson and I went there to visit them. The night the train pulled out of that old station, everyone came to see us off. None of them had been as far as Chicago. There was a theater in Omaha called the Brandeis where all of the big shows played. Harold Ross, one of the boys who bad come to see us off, had taken up theatrics in school. He said, We may see your name in lights one day on the Brandeis Theatre. I was eighteen. They didn’t know I wasn’t coming back.

In Chicago, Ida McAdams had the coatroom in a club on Clark Street. We lived upstairs in the hotel. She asked if I would help her in the club for a while. It was a great spot: the comedian Joe Frisco and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which had just come from New Orleans, were working there. That was before the band went to Reisenwebers in New York City, where they became the hit of New York and made a fortune. I knew all of them.

Cecile Wilson had been in show business before. She was going to see a producer she knew named Boyle Wolfaulk. He was producing a show that was going to the West Coast to play in Vaudeville houses. It was a condensed musical with soubrettes, comedians…. (Your father had sixteen shows like that when I met him.) Boyle Wolfaulk asked me to come and rehearse. When I protested that I hadn’t been in show business before, he said, Come along anyway. He had a few girls trying out who were professional dancers. By the time the show opened, I was really the only girl who was an amateur. Bobby Roberts was the juvenile. He was quite well-known in those days. Joe Roberts and his wife played the leads. They were good friends of Buster Keaton’s and he came often to see them. That show went to the West Coast and we were on the road for quite a few weeks. We returned to Chicago by train on the southern route bordering Mexico, I still remember what a long hot ride it was! When we returned, the show ended.

Somebody told me to go see a producer by the name of Eddie Beck. He gave me a job in a new show at the Marigold Gardens. That was a beautiful place. Rudolph Valentino and his partner were dancing there. He was very sweet; he was a nice guy, handsome and a very good dancer with a great personality. But today he wouldn’t be considered handsome with his patent leather hair. He married his partner, who was the heiress of a cosmetic firm. Her name was Hudnut. Ruth Etting was in the chorus. Bobby Roberts, with whom I was friends from my last show, was also appearing there. Ruth Etting, who was kind of catty, thought we had a romance going. When I said he was just a friend, she said, Well, if you don’t want him, I’ll take him. I stayed with that show about a year until it ended. The producer’s wife, Cookie Beck, told me a friend of hers named B. D. Berg was producing a show at the Winter Garden.

His office was in the North American Building. I’ll never forget. When I went to the office, Joe Burroughs, who was writing the music and lyrics for the show, informed me that B. D. Berg was at the rehearsal hall.. He gave me a note to take and said I should tell Mr. Berg that Mr. Burroughs said I was very nice and sweet. B. D. Berg interviewed me and I told him what Mr. Burroughs bad said. He told his choreographer Al McLaughlin that he wanted me in the show. Al asked how he planned to do that since all the girls had been hired and fitted for costumes. B. D. Berg answered, Let one of them go and put her in. That’s what he did. I had to sit there and watch rehearsal. He had his own costume company called Lombardi Limited which made the costumes for all his shows. I had to have the other girl’s costume refitted for me. Mr. Berg and Paul Rabn, the juvenile, went with me to the fitting. I was told to be at rehearsal the next day.

The show was called Looping the Loop, a play about the Loop in Chicago. It was a revue and it ran for nearly six months. I know because B. D. Berg and I were married six months after we met. That was in 1920. One night, he had even fired me for being late, but he remembered the home-cooked dinners I had made for him and I was rehired the next day. He had condensed musicals on the Keith, Vantages, and Loews circuits. He had quite a few acts going at the same time. When Looping the Loop closed, he produced another show that was going to the Coast. He wanted me to join it, which I did. Oh, that was a great little show: Ned Williams and Irene Williams, who weren’t related, were in it. Cecile Renick was in it too. They were all popular in vaudeville. The red-headed girl who was the soubrette in that show, Skitch Renard, was crazy about your father. She was burned up when I came along.

Soon after our marriage, Ben moved his offices to the Palace Theater Building in New York. He produced a couple other revues for the Keith circuit: Quakertown to Broadway and Hoosier Girl. They each ran an hour and a half and were followed by other acts.

After vaudeville went on the rocks, Ben opened an automobile business on 52d Street and 7th Avenue. That’s where I first met his brother Mike, who was one of the greatest trick cyclists and had traveled all over Europe. Their family was originally from Kovna, Russia. When they came to America, they opened a glove factory in Gloversville, New Hampshire. They must have had some money; anyway that’s where they settled. When I first met Ben, his father had died and a doctor had told his mother she should live in the mountains for her health. So she went to Fallsburg, New York, where she opened the first hotel there, which she kept going for quite a while. She lived in a house just across the road from the hotel. Ben gave up his automobile business and went to White Lake, New York, near Woodstock. He rented a large casino right on the lake and put in a revue. On August 28, 1922 he opened with Sophie Tucker, Mae West, Lilian Lorraine, W. S. Hart, and me, Mildred Darling. (Some of the girls in that show later went to work for Ziegfeld. They were beautiful.) He hired a Dixieland jazz band which was great and could play anything. It was a big show with comedians, an ingenue, a chorus of dancers, plus the band. They all had rooms at the casino, which was so big it could have covered a block. I’ve never seen such a big dance floor. There was a huge kitchen which served delicious food. Ben ran the White Lake Casino for a couple of years and then gave it up. It was just a summer thing, and he certainly couldn’t have made much money trying to take care of that big staff.

We returned to New York. Ziegfeld had a call for a new show, so I went. But I didn’t tell Ben, as he didn’t want me to work anymore. I got the job and went to work for Ziegfeld in the Midnight Frolics at the New Amsterdam Roof in 1922. On opening night, I finally told Ben and he came with baskets and baskets of flowers. They were stacked all over the lobby of the Roof. Appearing in that follies were Leon Errol, Will Rogers, Gloria Foy, and Carl Randall, who years later stole my scrap-book. Downstairs at the Amsterdam Theatre, Marilyn Miller was appearing in Sunny. While I was working there, I also made several films at the old Paramount Studios in Astoria, Long Island, with Mae Murry, Alice Brady, and Thomas Mehen. When Alice Brady had to dance a shimmy in a film, I taught her how.

Your father had a revue in Atlantic City with Fatty Arbuckle. He was as big a star in the movies as Chaplin, Keaton, all of them, in those days. Fatty became involved in a scandal with a girl who died. I never did find out the true story. He was supposed to have raped her. He was brought to trial. The rumor went around to the effect that he had put something up into her insides … or something like that…. But he was such a nice guy that everyone said it couldn’t be true. He got out of it, but he was ruined.

When I left Ziegfeld I went to work in a Shubert show about golf called Top Hole. Ray Raymond was the star. His wife, Dorothy McKay, was later involved in his death with her lover, who was Paul Kelly, another big movie star, who went to the penitentiary for manslaughter. William Randolph Hearst owned a building called the Beaux Arts on 6th Avenue, across from Bryant Park. Marion Davies, whom he kept for years, had an apartment there. Hearst was a big man … a huge man. The Bustonaby family had a restaurant on the ground floor with a large fountain. There was a grill on the 8th floor called the Gold Room. The washroom attendant made so much money there, he bought out the Bustonabys and took over the restaurant. Ben produced the shows, using Paul Rahn, whom I had first met in Chicago, and with the chorus doing the Charleston, which was just catching on. I used to be there every night, because Ben never left me home. Texas Guinan announced the shows and she’d say, Give this little girl a big hand, rave about her, look over at me and ask, Isn’t that right, Mrs. Berg? Joe Farr had the band. He was a violinist. All the movie stars came to the 8th floor grill: Rex Ingram, Mabel Normand—men drank champagne from her slippers, Bob Neally—he was the NE of the NEDICKS, Barbara LaMarr—a glamorous star, and Norma Bayes—she introduced Shine on Harvest Moon and gave your father a big red Spanish shawl which we had on our piano for years.

Ben left the Beaux Arts and took over a whole building on 58th Street across from the Plaza Hotel. He opened a room called Club Grandeur. It was 1924 and I was pregnant with you. We lived upstairs until you were born. The day I brought you home from the hospital one of your father’s customers, Hunt Humphries, who made all the gas fireplaces, came to see you. He called his wife and told her to buy some baby clothes. A few hours later, their maid arrived in a white uniform, carrying a huge box from Best & Company containing French baby dresses and bonnets.

Your father had some great clientele at the Club Grandeur! Henry Carrington and David and Louis Marx, the toy manufacturers, came. Louis Marx was Daniel Ellsburg’s father-in-law. Bobby Gillette, the razor heir, was a good customer, and Billy Leeds, the tin plate heir, who was married to Princess Zenia of Greece, would come home with Ben after the club closed. They would bring the band because Billy loved to play drums. He was at our house on his twenty-fifth birthday and Mamie, our maid, fixed scrambled eggs and champagne for breakfast. He and the princess were separated and they had a little girl just your age. He put his head down on the edge of the table to talk to you and hide his tears. He had a big estate in Oyster Bay and Ben gave him our police dog Lucky, because Billy had kennels and trained dogs there. Sometimes your father would go to his estate after the club closed for the night. One morning when the Dolly Sisters were there, wanting to play a joke on him, they locked him in the wine cellar. They quickly let him out when they heard him popping the wine corks. At Atlantic City, Billy rescued a drowning girl and later married her. Years after that he found out he had cancer and shot himself. People came from all over, even Europe, to the Club Grandeur. Your father ran it beautifully and had some of the finest people in the world as customers. He had a French chef and a head waiter named Rudolph. His waiters stayed with him for years. Some time later Ben opened the Palladium, a new club in a building he took at 15 West 56th Street, and he bought us a big Spanish-style house in Yonkers.

This was during Prohibition, but Ben had only private clubs with a charter membership, so he never had any trouble although the federal agents were always trying to get something on him. He always brought something home from the club. One night they stopped him and made him open his briefcase. It was full of oranges. Ray Calhoun, whom I went out with after Ben’s death while Ray was still the sole distributor for Cutty Sark, sold his company, the Gatsby Buckingham Corporation, for a fortune just before he died. He had a beautiful yacht and a beautiful home in Fieldston. But back in those days, he had started out as a rumrunner.

Your father sure loved you. He bought all of your clothes. One time he went to Best & Company and paid $60.00 for one little outfit, a Scotch plaid skirt, a white silk ruffled blouse, and a little black velvet vest. He bought shoes with buckles on them for you in every color: red, blue, black patent leather. He had dresses made to order for you, six at a time. They were very expensive as they were pure silk with hand smocking. Your little bedroom was at the back of the house and was furnished with a light blue bedroom set he bought for you: a little bed with a big red apple on the headboard, a chest of drawers, a little clothes tree, and a dresser with pull knobs that were ABC blocks decorated with apples in the center. Ben had the band come home often, especially if we had company. They would play Why Do I Love You in the yard under your window. (Ben had picked that song for you, because it was his favorite.)

By that time, we had a penthouse club on Madison Avenue which your father wanted to reopen on Park Avenue. After Ben died, his brother Mike tried to run it for a while, but he didn’t know beans from peas about running a club. He also lacked your father’s terrific personality and sense of humor. Ben had everyone having a gay time. Customers used to send him telegrams saying, We’re coming to town. Don’t forget to shave. He hated shaving.

Years later when I was working at the 21 Club, Dave Marx used to say, We never had so much fun, before or after, as we had at your husband’s place. But Ben really overdid himself. The day before his heart attack we were in New York at the club. He wanted to get home in time to listen to Amos and Andy, because every Sunday he always listened to them and to the opera or the symphony. We stopped at a place he knew to pick up a case of beer to take home, and ran into some of his friends. He began drinking and lost track of the time. From there, he wanted to go to Charlie Lucas’s. They kept sending champagne to our table as if we were royalty. We ended up at Nick Bate’s Merry-Go-Round on 55th between Madison and Park. When we started home, I wanted to drive. He got mad and flew off to his brother Dave’s place on 59th Street where he spent the night. He came home the next day terribly ill. He remained in bed until he went to the hospital where he stayed about three days. It was Sunday, his family had come to visit him, and I had brought them home for lunch. As soon as the phone rang, I knew. By the time I got back to the hospital, he was gone.

That was in 1932. The stock market had crashed and Ben died broke. I was left with an insurance policy and two small children. Your brother Jimmy was two years old. I went to see a concessionaire who had checkrooms in all the big clubs. He paid fifty thousand dollars a year for the concession at the Copacabana, things were that good in those days. He put me to work in the Cotton Club on 48th Street. I enjoyed it there. I worked with Cab Calloway; Duke Ellington; Bill Robinson; Ethel Waters; Peg Leg Bates; Tip, Tap, and Toe; Rosetta Tharpe; and the Nicholas Brothers. They had extravagant shows with beautiful costumes. Herman Stark was the big boss with Mike Best and Connie Immerman from Connie’s Inn in Harlem. He probably had some racketeer backers. Herman’s brother Louis had complete charge of the kitchen. Since he lived near us in Yonkers and didn’t drive, he paid for the gas and I used to drive him home after work. Herman and Louis must have had a piece of Dickie Wells’s place in Harlem, as Louis had to stop there on the way home every night. The West Side Highway hadn’t been built yet, so we’d drive through Central Park, out at 11 Oth Street, and through Harlem to Wells. Dickie’s was one of the most popular after hours spots and we’d stop and have a few drinks. I was working at the Cotton Club when Bill Robinson had his sixtieth birthday. It took place after closing hours and everybody came. That was some party!

I’ll never forget Cab Calloway’s birthday party. They had given him a big cake which he had left at the club. Louis Stark said, Well now, we’ll have to stop at the Calloway’s and bring Cab’s cake to him. Cab’s cousin and his wife were up from Baltimore and staying at his house in Fieldston. It was around Christmas; there was snow on the ground and the Christmas decorations were gorgeous. Cab’s manager had bought that house in his name for